Biography Information

The "Dick and Nora
Show." Richard Hall and colleague representing the Volunteer
Abstractor Program at an American Psychological Association convention,
1970s.

Richard
H. Hall
4418 39th Street
Brentwood, MD 20722

RICHARD H. HALL BIOGRAPHY

Richard Hall was born December 25, 1930, in
Hartford, Connecticut, reincarnated from a previous life as a Civil War
soldier. (So his ex-wife tried to convince him.) His early years were
spent in West Hartford, including attendance at the Sedgwick School. His
parents (James A. Hall and Rachel Rudd Hall) and his four male siblings
moved to Pleasant Valley in the mid-1930s, where the younger attended the
grammar school and all went on to high school at The Gilbert School in
Winsted, Connecticut. There they were exposed to intellectual stimulation
by the offspring of families named Nader, Halberstam, Amenta, Dery, and
others.

When the Korean War was imminent, Richard
enlisted in the fledgling U.S. Air Force in 1949 to avoid being drafted
into the Army (does that make him a "draft-dodger?") and served
into early 1951, followed by six years in the Air Force Reserve. During
his time at Keesler AFB, Mississippi,
he worked in the base athletic department and other areas of Personnel
Services, winning several table tennis ("Ping Pong")
tournaments.

After returning to civilian life he flopped
around for a few years trying a little of this and a little of that, and
then enrolled at Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1954.
Originally a mathematics major, he tired of that discipline and switched
to a major in philosophy and a minor in mathematics. Because of his
generally high grades (A-/B+) he was wooed by Phi Beta Kappa but didn't
care to participate in what seemed to him snobbish activities. Instead,
attracted by then emerging news about sightings of "flying
saucers" (UFOs) in the 1950s he opted to make himself available to
the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) then
being formed.

After working for NICAP for about 10 years,
Hall resigned to find "honest" (i.e., paying) work because of
impending marriage. For a number of years thereafter, he worked for
various trade associations in Washington, D.C., and for some "Beltway
Bandit" consulting firms as a writer-editor. The marriage failed. His
final formal job before semi-retirement was as an abstractor-indexer at
Congressional Information Service, Bethesda, Maryland for about 10 years.
(See resume below.)

Hall served as Chairman of the Fund for UFO
Research, 1993-1998, and is the author of several books. He was selected
to be listed in Marquis Who's Who in the East.

He is also a founding member of the Church of
Equine Velocity and holds the title of magister velocitatis equinae.

January to
December, 1993: Part-time abstractor, National Center on the Aging,
Washington,D.C.
Creating summaries of journal articles and books on computer disc for
gerontology andgeriatrics
abstracts journal (quarterly).

(*) These
articles since have been picked up by college text publishers to serve as
chapters inhistory
texts; one by American Heritage, requested by a history professor at the
Air ForceAcademy,
the other by Harcourt & Brace.